Then the story dips into deep-snoop dialogue and takes off for Hammett heaven. Slow start turns into a great grabber.
Sequel to Tramble’s debut, The Dying Ground (2001), continuing the story of Maceo Redfield.
In 1989, Maceo, a failed baseball powerhouse in Oakland, California, investigated the murder of his childhood best friend, Billy Crane, turned successful drug dealer. Billy’s girlfriend Felicia Bennett had been Maceo’s true love but went missing when she was the only witness to Billy’s murder. Meanwhile, Tramble deals vividly with Oakland’s spreading crack cocaine epidemic. It’s now two years later and Maceo, 25 and facially scarred, returns from the freedom of having been on the road and his own master. First off, even before going to see his beloved Granddaddy, he hits his old barbershop, ever the CNN news center of Oakland’s African-Americans, and learns that his friend Cornelius “Cotton” Knox (with whom he and Billy Crane were raised by Granddaddy and who’s now star of the Anaheim Vanguard basketball team) is being hounded about a nameless woman “bludgeoned” to death (actually, her throat was slit) in a San Francisco hotel room registered to him. But Maceo senses that his other childhood friend, Jonathan Holly Ford, is being set up to take the fall for Cotton. Well-heeled Cotton is married to Allaina, dramatically beautiful in diamond necklace, big engagement rock, and blinding white suit open to the navel. “That is not the wife of a poor man,” says Maceo’s barber, seeing her on TV. With Billy’s death, Holly has inherited Oakland’s drugbiz and was seen with Cotton while they argued with two thugs in the lobby of the San Francisco hotel, apparently about the dead girl. In Berkeley, for no reason he knows, someone saps Maceo in a parking lot. He goes out to see Cotton at his fortress in Timber Hills, where he rescues the gorgeous Sonny Boston, double-talking friend of the dead girl (and a regular Brigid O’Shaughnessy), and takes her to his pad.
Then the story dips into deep-snoop dialogue and takes off for Hammett heaven. Slow start turns into a great grabber.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-75882-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
Griffiths, who is known for the Magic Men mysteries and the Ruth Galloway series, has written her first stand-alone novel...
A secondary school English department in West Sussex is turned upside down by a series of bookish killings.
Clare Cassidy is heading into middle age with just her teenage daughter, her faithful dog, her diary, and her teaching job to occupy her time. The most exciting part of her life may be the biography she hopes to write of R.M. Holland, a writer of gothic tales who once lived in the school where she works. But when one of her colleagues in the English department at Talgarth High is found murdered with a line from "The Stranger," the very same Holland story that has long obsessed Clare, left on a Post-it next to her body, she quickly realizes the murderer must be someone who knows an awful lot about her. This suspicion is confirmed when, the day before Halloween, Clare discovers that someone else has left her a note in her own diary. As the violence escalates, Clare and the police must figure out why the killer seems so fixated on Clare—and what a supernaturally tinged tale more than a hundred years old has to do with the quiet lives of small-town Brits. Griffiths alternates points of view among Clare, her 15-year-old daughter, Georgie, and DS Harbinder Kaur, the queer policewoman in charge of the murder investigation. Thrown into the mix are excerpts from "The Stranger," itself a delicious homage to writers like M.R. James. Though all these ingredients occasionally cause some structural unwieldiness, Griffiths (The Vanishing Box, 2018, etc.) hits a sweet spot for readers who love British mysteries and who are looking for something to satisfy an itch once Broadchurch has been binged and Wilkie Collins reread.
Griffiths, who is known for the Magic Men mysteries and the Ruth Galloway series, has written her first stand-alone novel with immensely pleasurable results.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-328-57785-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
Earnest, heavier than usual on old-fashioned detective work, and ritualistic to a fault. If you’re surprised by anything...
Marshal Virgil Cole and Deputy Marshall Everett Hitch face what amounts to an underground range war in Appaloosa.
The minute rancher James McCormick found gold on the parcel of land he’d purchased from Henri Baptiste, Baptiste rued the sale and tried everything he could to persuade McCormick and his brother, Daniel, to sell it back. The measures the Baptiste Group took included hiring seven gunslingers headed by fearsome Victor Bartholomew to intimidate the McCormicks and their miners, two of whom have now vanished. Nothing daunted, the McCormicks have engaged Edward Hodge and some gunmen of their own. As each side swaggers and threatens and waits for the other to back down, tensions rise across the town’s 4,000 souls. But dressmaker Allie French, Cole’s sweetie, still keeps her sights fixed firmly on Appaloosa Days, the celebration of local culture she’s enticed visiting actress/singer Martha Kathryn to join. Since sparks have instantly flown between Martha and Hitch, the lawmen have an even greater stake than usual in keeping the peace. But that promises to be harder than they know. An unnamed kid has broken out of jail, traced his roots to Appaloosa, and set his course for the troubled town, apparently robbing and killing everyone in his path except for a teamster’s wife whose Amazonian figure makes her even more intimidating than him. In short order, she takes him to bed, stokes the fires of his quest for vengeance, and tags along to provide logistical support. Cole and Hitch, who’ve now appeared in more novels written by Knott (Robert B. Parker’s Revelation, 2017, etc.) than by their creator, have little to do but stand around, tote up the rising body count and occasionally augment it, and offer gruffly monosyllabic responses to questions that come their way as the perfect storm gathers to strike their hometown.
Earnest, heavier than usual on old-fashioned detective work, and ritualistic to a fault. If you’re surprised by anything that happens, you need to read more Westerns.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1827-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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